Sunday Q & A

Published: May 6, 2001

Sunday Q & A begins today and will appear in this section weekly. Readers are invited to send in questions about national or international affairs; those selected will be answered by Times correspondents who specialize in those issues. Information about submitting questions appears below.

Mr. Greenspan's financial disclosure statement, last updated less than a year ago, lists income-producing assets valued at $2.26 million to $6.76 million. Nearly all of it was in the form of short-term Treasury bills, with some in cash. Those investments produced income of $169,000 to $532,000 in 1999 (the form requires only ranges for asset values and income). Mr. Greenspan also draws a government salary of $161,200 a year.

Federal Reserve officials said that Mr. Greenspan, like other Fed governors, is technically allowed to own stocks and to trade them, with certain limitations, including a ban on buying and selling in the week before or the day of meetings of the central bank at which it considers changes in interest rates.

But they said Mr. Greenspan had chosen to go beyond the technical restrictions and not invest in anything other than short-term Treasury securities, which are less subject to interest rate variations than longer-term bonds.

He has stocks in the family. His wife, Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News correspondent, holds shares in companies that include Abbott Laboratories, Kimberly Clark and Anheuser-Busch.

Learning a Tough Language

Q. What are the hardest languages for English speakers to learn?

A. Diana Jean Schemo, a Washington correspondent, responds:

Ray Clifford, provost of the Defense Language Institute, says the difficulty of learning a foreign language is directly related to how much it differs from a student's native language, in its rules of syntax and grammar, its alphabet and even the culture it springs from.

The Defense Department devotes the most time, 63 weeks, to teaching its hardest languages, which include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Less difficult are Russian and the Slavic languages, Vietnamese, Farsi and some Asian languages, to which the Defense Department devotes 47 weeks' training, followed by German, Indonesian and other languages ranked with them in difficulty. Romance languages are considered the easiest for Americans with little foreign language background to master, along with some Scandinavian languages.

The State Department grades languages similarly, but counts Mongolian and Georgian among its ''super hard'' languages. Notably, perhaps because many of its employees have studied a foreign language previously, it also considers German as easy to learn as French, Spanish and other Romance languages.

Camera Shy in Afghanistan

Q. If the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan are against depicting the human form on statues, how do they feel about photographs?

A. Barry Bearak, a New Delhi correspondent who has frequently reported from Afghanistan, responds:

Generally, the top Talibans have little regard for Kodak moments and have banned depictions of the human form whether in photographs, films or paintings. When given a visa, reporters are warned against taking pictures of any living thing. But in practice, people are seldom discouraged when a camera is pointed at a donkey or a tree.

There is no known photograph of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader. But a few other mullahs will sit for a snapshot or two. On the front line, a photographer is often pestered by commanders and soldiers who want to be immortalized in the company of a rocket launcher.

Photographs are actually required when applying for a passport or visa, though in the case of women, only the eyes are allowed to show. Afghan men, if they are Muslims, are required to wear beards -- and untrimmed ones at that. My passport photo, taken in 1998, shows me cleanshaven. I have since added an often-ragged fluff of whiskers. Whatever the effect on my looks, several visa officers have commended me for making spiritual progress.

Send questions by e-mail to sundayq&a@ nytimes.com, or by mail to Sunday Q & A, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. Those of widest interest will be selected, but unpublished questions cannot be answered individually.